I was sitting at home the other night, cup of tea in one hand remote in the other looking forward to a night of hilarity with Jon Stewart’s Daily Show and the “Mid Term Mid-Tacular” on more4, when seconds after the programme started, the screen shutters and goes black. NTL’s digital service in Dublin is flaky at the best of times so I figured it would be back on shortly. 2 minutes later and there was still nothing. So I switched channels, and they were all black. Then I checked the analogue service and that was down too.
“Dammit”, I thought, “must be a cable fault”
So I searched for my bill to find the customer support service number and gave them a call. Now, you’re probably thinking to yourself, “he must have had a bad experience with some technician over the phone”, or “they were rude to him, that’s why he’s writing”
Nope.
It seems NTL has no technical support after 8pm. I was greeted by a nice if somewhat blunt voice telling me that office hours were from 8am to 8pm.
What the hell? So, let me get this straight, after 8pm, when most people are watching television, and most faults are likely to occur because of the increased drain on the system, that’s when you all decide to go home. What kind of crap is that?
In any other modern western country you’d use your power as a consumer to switch to a service that didn’t frankly suck, but in Dublin your only choice is NTL if you live in the city centre or in rented accommodation. I’m not allowed put up a dish for sky and forget about getting analogue transmission. So you’re left with a sub standard service that cares absolutely nothing about their customers.
This isn’t my first run in with NTL either. When I was getting the service installed in the first place I had to take time off work to let the technician in, only to get a call 15 minutes before he was to arrive to check that I had arranged to have the locker where the cables were open with the management company. This was the first I had heard about this. You would think that it technically being NTL’s property they would have their own keys, but no. The technician, not too politely told me I’d have to arrange another time.
So I rang up their customer support staff only to be treated even worse by a nasty woman who proceeded to treat me like she was doing me a favour even talking to me. She then proceeded to blame me for not knowing something they had failed to tell me about. I tried to get across the point that how was I supposed to ask about something I didn’t even know I needed to know. Of course, knowing full well I had no other choice I was derided and basically told, well if you want your service you can either like it or lump it.
How in this day and age any company can get away with the way NTL carries on is beyond me. The government really need to open up competition seriously in the Dublin area and deal with this problem once and for all.
Oh, and the quality of the digital service is appalling.
(Just though I’d throw that in there!)
I ended up emailing them, but was without services until the following morning. I finally got a response to my email a day later to tell me that there were problems in my area and a technician was being dispatched to investigate the problem. 12 hours after by brutal TV service was restored.
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